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Sunday, March 27, 2016

Class of 16

Yesterday we started Project "Class of '16" in OSgrid. This as lots of users have troubles setting up regions, and it is hard to get "background information" on how things work. Currently you have to wade through a gazillion of good / bad / outdated webpages to get a clue on how to operate things.

We try to centralize data for our classes on the OSgrid Wiki.
Each weeks class preparation will be posted in the tutorials, and on the "discussion page" of it, a cleaned exempt of the given class will be posted. (This is edited text, corrected on factual details, spelling errors, and all names / login spam etc. are removed).

Since things barely go according to plan, and this being the 1st "class" i have given since long, it was not completely as i imagined.(as i'm a bit chaotic by nature). It's very hard to determine "where to start" and what the "basic level" of available knowledge is, and there is so much to tell. Staying "within the relevant scope" is difficult.
For instance i saw someone mention subnetting during the course, but this is too elaborate to hop into. (same as binary, differences between transport control protocol and user datagram packets, switching & routing), all very relevant, but not directly required for a user running a basic region on OSgrid. Our goal is to enable people to find relevant and understandable up to date tutorials on how to setup, configure & maintain a region on OSGrid. And if your an egineer, you likely don't need it. You can figure out the puzzle with whats already out there. But if you're not some expert, we want to give you a good place to start, and not to scare you with stuff that just takes some education. You learnt how to drive, now learn to run a simulator.

Anyhow. The feedback we received was mainly positive, people understood the things that were discussed and told, and the information provided was sufficient to have an basic idea on why the various network typologies can require different approaches for configuring them.

Next week we will cover the pre-requisites and installation. If your new and you want a region on OSgrid. This is your day! If you follow this course, you should be left with a working region on your own machine. ( If not, we will troubleshoot it the week after.).

Mind that each step in the course will assume you read and understood the terminology of the previous topics. The course will get considerably more technical each week. We try to keep things "simple" and translate the technical procedures to understandable English without them "loosing their meaning", but it's unavoidable we hit some more complex subjects, which will require some stuff "you will just need to learn". The wiki will be updated prior to the next class. It's handy if you take a sneak preview when you attend.

Also don't feel ashamed to ask questions. The learning curve is steep, but the reward is awesome.So if you have questions, feel free to ask.